According to my sleep tracker that I just started using– it’s not entirely accurate I’m sure– I was in bed for just of 10 hours again last night. I’m progressively falling asleep earlier and earlier, which is a good thing, but my waking times don’t seem to be changing very much. It’s humbling to realize how little I know about sleep. I didn’t go for a run yesterday, which I said I would. I was thinking that I’d just sleep early and wake up early and do it in the morning– but as it turns out, I didn’t wake up. But I’ll persist. I’m sure I’m not going to be spending 10 hours in bed for weeks on end– this must be some sort of recovery phase. I’ll continue tracking the data and continue seeing what I can do about it… I want to keep going to bed earlier, eventually falling asleep before 11pm– and then I want to regularly wake up at 6am in the morning or earlier, go for my run, do my word vomits, do some reading, and so on.
One of the best things we do at work is our daily marketing sitdown. Every evening we meet for a few minutes to tell each other what we accomplished that day, what we need help with, and what we plan to do the next day. Before we did this, we’d only meet up once a week for a more formal meeting, and we’d very often find that we were behind or slipping on things that we said we wanted to do– usually because there was some additional complexity that we had not prepared for. We’d try to talk about what we ought to do to stop it from happening, but the idea of rewards and punishments always seeemed a bit extreme, a bit silly, and I think we were all self-aware of that as we were talking about it. It didn’t seem to fit the situation.
And then we started doing daily sitdowns, and things started changing pretty quickly. It became the highlight of my workday– something to look forward to, to share micro-achievements with the rest of the team each day. Initially we’d tell each other what we were stuck with, and we’d help each other get unstuck. After a while, we’d notice that the frequency of “I’m stuck with this” was going down– I think because we’d preemptively ask ourselves the question we’d ask each other, and get ourselves unstuck in our heads hours before the meeting. We’d also seem to be less overwhelmed in general– again, I think because we pick better tasks to do– by “better” I mean things that are likelier to get done, things that are likelier to have a clear impact on our overal efforts. Prior to daily sitdowns, I would sometimes get carried away shaving yaks. There’s a lot less room for yak-shaving when you talk about what you did each day. You’re more obliged to do something actually-valuable at each step.
I feel like I should be learning from that. I try to overthink things and come up with complicated or profound solutions to things, but it’s clear that I just need some sort of daily acountability system, just as I do with work. I need to do it with myself. Why have I been putting it off? Perfectionism, I think. I remember setting aside a bunch of to-do boxes for daily reviews but I never got around to doing it. Why? What’s stopping me? I want each piece of paper to look really nice and full of insight. Blah blah blah. Just as I do 1,000 vomits, maybe I should do 1,000 daily sitdowns with self. Because I think it’s becoming very clear to me that the only difference (as far as I can tell…) between me doing well and me doing not so well is just… regularity.
Well, maybe not but that’s the theory I want to test. I want to test the idea that if I do something every single day I will be changed by it somehow. I’ve started many different times, but it always stops. Why? I don’t know… maybe I need to tie it to something other than myself. So with work, it works when I tie it to my colleagues, who are willing to help. I suppose I should ask my wife to help me with this one, and we should make it a part of some routine that we already have. I suppose we should make sure we do it before we go to bed.
I don’t want to get too grand in proclaiming about all the amazing things that will happen and yadda yadda. That’s kind of a recipe for disaster, because when I commit to big complex things, I then come up with big complex excuses for why they don’t pan out. Instead I should work on something really small. I already know this, I’m ust repeating myself. It should start with tonight. I wonder how many times people typically fail at this sort of pursuit before they succeed. I’m saying that I’m willing to try over and over and over again, but is that as valuable as I think it is? Should I be willing to give up at some point?
I think not. I think if I fail repeatedly, it might mean that there’s something that I’m missing, and I’ll have to attack it from a different angle. But a daily review is a very simple thing to conceive. The habit formation bit maybe is not so clear. Maybe I should do it the moment I get home, before I start anything else. Maybe I should tie it to my vomit. Yup, I should, because I’m trying to do vomits every day, too. It’s something to think about. But really, I just need to do it.
Should I do one for yesterday? Erhmm. Yesterday I did keep track of my day in Google Calendar. I should just persist with that, keep tracking so that I have something to refer to when summarizing the day.
Okay cool.